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A note here in response to several readers: The question here was not meant to apply to the Navy's base at Guantanamo.

And my own two cents worth here:

There remains in much of the wider discussion of this question an assumption--implicit and often explicit--that the detainees are necessarily dangerous terrorists or just "bad people," in John McCain's words. This was heard most notably after the Supreme Court's opinion in the Boumediene case--when we heard criticism that the court was giving "rights to terrorists." That assumption "begs the question"--in the true meaning of that phrase: it assumes to be true, that which remains to be proven. If we knew them to be terrorists, we would not be having this debate.

Also, the fact that a lot of the "evidence" against detainees is inadmissible is often seen as a mere inconvenience that makes ordinary due process inappropriate for them on "technical" grounds. If evidence is inadmissible because of, say, water-boarding, it's reliability is in doubt as is the rationale for holding the detainee in the first place.

Framing the issues around false premises only makes it harder to resolve.

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